The Hazards of Being Cannon Fodder
by Xander-San
Summary: She was useless and she knew it. In a battle between gods, what use was one broken, crippled, mediocre-at-best kunoichi? Until she stumbled upon three seals that had been written off as useless, and with them tore her way into a world where she was the one who held the pieces. And now it's her turn to play god. Strong!Dark Tenten, Time travel. Rated M for violence and dark themes.
1. Chapter 1

**A/N: Explanation of confusing things at bottom of chapter**

 _Present_

Bloodied, chakra-infused fingers scrabbled on torn paper.

 _He had done everything he could._ _They just weren't ready for another war - or a continuation of a war they thought they had won. Not that it mattered whether this was the Fourth or Fifth war - he wouldn't be around to write the history books._

 _They would not be the victors._

Blood loss, lack of oxygen - probably from the gaping hole in the middle of their chest - would have made this impossible for just about anyone. Years of practice - with fuuinjutsu, with kunai and swords and shuriken and handseals and paperwork and millions of other things - made that handicap negligible, as blood was used in place of ink to draw a seal that would kill anyone without massive amounts of chakra.

Luckily, there was this thing called a bijuu in very close proximity.

 _They were dead. The last of them - the poor, bun haired girl who had lost her leg in the very first attack - had thrown herself in front of a chidori meant for him, a hand that once belonged to an ally sinking elbow-deep through bone and flesh as if it were no more than water._

 _He had failed. All of them were dead - the people he had sworn to defend, who he had fought side-by-side with, who had loved him and respected him. Who had fought for him, who had died for him._

 _Dead, and there was nothing he could do._

The seal was nearing completion, and Madara - wearing the body of a red-haired girl - chuckled as Naruto stumbled to his knees, his left hand severed at the wrist. "You have failed, Uzumaki. Your village is gone, its citizens dead, its protectors fallen. There is nothing you can do."

The seal was finished - a quick kanji for a wind affinity, and another to connect it to another nearby seal that was full of stolen chakra, because even a bijuu cannot power some seals.

"The world will fall to the infinite Tsukuyomi, and you cannot stop me, Naruto."

Naruto gasped, heaving on his right and only remaining hand. "You will fall one day, Marada. Your dream world will fail and someone will kill you, succeed where I will not."

Madara(Or Kin-Madara-Zetsu, whatever he was now) sneered down at the blonde before him. "Maybe. But you have failed, Uzumaki. Nothing you can do will stop me."

There was a snort of laughter, and both men turned to the girl that they thought was dead as she finished transcribing the seal. Bloodied fingertips reached up in a mock salute, as Madara's purple ringed eyes widened and Naruto grinned.

"Well, I guess it's good I'm that here to fuck it up for you, isn't it, you assholes?"

Madara lunged, not knowing what the seal was but anyone with common sense knew better than to let a seal master - or mistress, in this case - activate a seal of any kind.

Tenten chuckled, then channeled what little chakra she had left into the seal. There was a scream, a roar, and then a _twist_ as the very nature of the universe itself cried out as laws that had never even been touched were broken.

And then she was gone.

 _Three years before the End_

Tenten slammed the empty mug on the countertop, glaring at the barkeep. If it were anyone else, he would have - could have - cut them off three or seven mugs ago. This was a shinobi bar, after all - he was an ex-ANBU himself, and he was no pushover.

"More."

And yet he found himself jumping to, nodding frantically as she fiddled with a kunai in her hand. Ex-ANBU he may have been, but one does not antagonize the Living Armory, even drunk and crippled as she was. His hands absentmindedly filled the glass, and he briefly considered throwing a bit of the sleeping powder he kept for situations like this in the mix.

The kunai found itself embedded in a wall along with seventeen others, forming the last stroke of a kanji - betrayal. Among that were several curses, a few shapes, and the name 'Neji' several times over. Distantly, he noted that her increasing inebriation had not affected her aim in the slightest.

He clunked the mug down in front of her(sleeping-powder free, he didn't want to die tonight), and she just stared at it for a while before swiftly grabbing and downing it in one smooth motion, tossing the burning liquid down in a single gulp.

She swallowed, relishing in the pain and trying to convince herself that the tears in her eyes were because the drink hurt, and not because her last remaining friend was too busy to talk to her.

Not like it was a big deal. She didn't need anyone to talk to. She was fine, really. Lee didn't need to come talk her out of her stupor. It had been six years, after all. Six years since Neji had decided that being married to a nameless, barren orphan was a waste of his time and ran off with some whore of a branch member. No, it was fine.

Belatedly, she realized that she had said at least a few of those things out loud and the barkeep was staring at her warily. She narrowed her eyes, glaring - although it came out as more of a pout - and realized that her glass was full again. Did she ask for that, or did he just fill it? Good guy, whichever it was.

Fuckin' Neji. Walking around with his _perfect_ kids with their stupid long black hair and chubby faces and white eyes. Stupid kids that she couldn't hate because they were stupid and adorable.

Stupid little kid, with his wide innocent eyes and impossible to hate face that looked so much like a little chibi Neji that she was stuck somewhere between sobbing and cooing whenever she saw him. Him and his six year old curiosity, coming up to 'Auntie Tenten' and asking why she didn't have any kids if she loved them so much.

God, she had never wanted to strangle a kid so much. It was like Neji had trained the fucker to ruin her life - as if he hadn't enough already.

As if he was the only one who hurt after three miscarriages and that horrible, awful visit to Sakura where she gave them that news in clinical words but quiet tones.

Basically, the odds of her having kids were about as high as Lee wearing something other than spandex or Neji braiding his hair.

But she hadn't strangled the little boy who reminded her constantly of everything she lost, of nights spent crying and a surgery that was too risky to try but too late to take back. So she had just smiled and said that she was too old now, but she wished she could.

And then, once she had dropped little Shinji off at the Hyuuga compound with his father, she had run to this bar and immediately started drowning herself in sake as fast as she could. Not like anyone would care. Her only friend was a newlywed, and his wife was late to return from a mission. Karin was a big girl, but two months was two months and Water was only a two week round-trip. Granted, it was a diplomatic meeting of sorts, but how long does it take to check and see why a jinchuuriki's chakra pathways were messed up?

So Tenten didn't begrudge Lee of his worrying, and if that worrying happened to involve running laps around fire country to check in at every outpost, what was she to do?

Thank god for sake and shinobi bars.

Three hours after midnight, she decided that she had had enough and stumbled to the door, tugging on her weapons with chakra strings, pulling them all back into the seal on her wrist. Blearily, she noted the hundred or so holes she had left in the wall, and how the barkeep was glaring at her. She frowned, and then tossed a few twenty-ryo notes on the floor before turning and leaving, stumbling on her leg.

Defeating Madara before he had enacted his 'blah blah rule the world' plan had come at a cost for all of them - the lives of friends, homes, belongings.

For her, it was her left leg. From the hip down, she was wood and metal, rather than the skin she used to be so proud of.

"Used to have such nice legs, too." She mumbled to herself, as she pulled on the chakra strings a little too hard, causing herself to stumble. Thank god for Kankuro - well, his notes at least. She had never got along all that well with him. He had sent some of Chiyo-sama's notes on ninja-appropriate prosthetics to Konoha as a gift after the Fourth War had ended. She was a half-decent puppetmaster, enabling her to take C or lower ranked missions - some combat, but nothing too serious. Being an administrative ninja(read:Desk jockey) paid a lot more than C ranks.

This was also the reason why she wasn't allowed into ANBU, no matter how much she longed for a way to drown herself in work, rather than alcohol.

She stumbled to her doorstep, pulling her keys out as she went. She pulled the ring of keys out - there were over a dozen of them, and she had forgotten what ten of them went to awhile ago. One was to her door, the other was to the safe in her closet.

"Who the fuck waxed my doorknob?" She muttered, fingers scrabbling on the metal. "Scratch that. Who the fuck put another doorknob on my door?"

Tenten was a lot more inebriated than she thought she was.

Finally managing to get the cursed door open, she flopped her kunai pouch on the floor, then proceeded to sprint to the bathroom and vomit. Fuck. Detox time.

Why did she get so fucking wasted again? Ah, right. Neji. Fuck that fucker with a fuckin.. er.. fuck.

A _lot_ more inebriated than she thought she was.

Three hours and six trips to the bathroom later, Tenten flopped onto her bed, muttering to herself. She hastily pulled her prosthetic off, tossing the wood and metal at the wall. It was a ninja prosthetic, and she didnt throw it that hard.

She forced herself into sleep - a habit after years of ninja training - and for once stayed asleep for the whole night. She woke up as she always did - instantly alert and ready to grab the kunai from under her pillow if need be, checking for nearby sounds of breathing or life. So what if the door to her room was buried under layers upon layers of seals and traps? Habits die hard, and four years of living as a desk jockey didn't change that.

Cracking her back as she woke, she was sat up and went to raise her arms into the air, then was nearly sent back into unconsciousness as she was reminded of exactly how much she drank last night.

"Fuck. This is the bit where I would say something about never drinking again but like hell thats ever gonna happen. Annnnd I'm talking to myself again." Shaking her head(then regretting it immediately) she formed the seals for a healing jutsu then sighed in relief as her hangover cleared off.

Hey, two years of dedicating her life to healing jutsu before finally realizing it was yet another thing she failed at had benefits. Tsunade-sama, she was not be. But she at least knew how to heal cuts, set broken bones, and make her life as an alcoholic easier.

Speaking of her former idol, the blonde had requested her presence at the office today. Something about a message delivery that required a Jounin? Obviously low rank, but hey, it was a way to get out of the village, and if she haggled and played the 'Im a cripple please pity me' card well enough she could wiggle a price increase out of it.

Tenten hummed softly to herself, not exactly excited but maybe... expectant? Yeah, expectant. She made herself a cup of coffee, stirring about a half pound of sugar into it and some of that fancy mint creamer she splurged on yesterday. She sipped it, then let out a quiet hum of appreciation.

 _Today might not be that bad of a day after all._

Of course, roughly three seconds after she started feeling good about the day everything went to shit.

Off in the distance, what she later learned was about two feet in front of the main gate, she felt a massive surge of chakra, infused with enough killing intent to drop small animals dead with fear.

Old, battle worn habits kicked in - no matter they hadnt been useful in years - and within a second she had reached into one of the seals tattooed on her arm, pumped a small modicum of chakra into it, tumbled to the side and let a massive dome of metal cover her, forming out of the void of nothingness she called it out of and clattering to the ground with a loud clang.

She heard the muffled sound of a massive burst of wind, a mighty pressure that pushed the whole _building_ she was in back, and then a groan as the structural supports of her apartment building began to fail. There was a brief sensation of weightlessness, right before she realized that _her home was collapsing_ _and taking her with it_. Sealessly, she tugged on a seal she had placed on the outskirts of training ground 44, and suddenly she found herself missing a quarter of her total chakra reserves and on the edges of the forest

She had experimented with a few seals in the past, one of them being able to let a person use **Kamiwari** on an object at a long distance. This also had the unfortunate effect of increasing the chakra usage for it by ten times the normal cost, so she gave it up as a bad job.

Rushing as fast as her leg would let her, she ran up the side of the tree to get a vantage point of what exactly was going on. When she was near the top, she looked over her home village and nearly stumbled off in shock.

Konoha was almost entirely gone. Again.

A massive cone of destruction had torn its way through the center of the village, easily wiping out an entire half of the buildings on its own. Among them were the main residential districts, the academy, and the hokage tower - all of them reduced to rubble.

She knew within seconds that anyone within the blast radius was already dead. Tens of thousands obliterated in an instant, among them most of the genin and chuunin, as they lived in the Shinobi residential district. She pressed her back to the tree, sliding down slowly as the true magnitude of what had happened occurred to her.

The only attack of this level she had seen before was from Pain, but he was dead - she had watched him die with her own eyes. Even then, he had attacked from above, merely pressing down on the village. Many people had died in his attack, but more to property damage. Most of the people had managed to crawl out of the rubble.

But there was almost no rubble. It was simply _gone._ A black furrough in the earth, all that remained of where her village used to be. She noted with abstract curiosity that her own home wasn't even in the affected area, it had simply collapsed due to the air displacement.

Someone had used a **Shinra Tensei** nearly three times as powerful as Pain had, and she knew with dawning horror who it was.

Madara had, somehow, lived through Naruto's attack or found a way to come back again.

And with an eye used to seeing the truth, a mind dedicated to combat, and thought process that had trained her ability to lie to herself out, she knew that a war was coming and they had already lost.

 _One and a Half years Before the End_

Tenten knew she was useless. Knew that, in the war they were fighting, she was _below_ being cannon fodder. Even in the original Fourth war(Or was it the Fourth war, and this one was the fifth?) she had been useless against Kabuto's army of undead and could barely hold her own against tides of White Zetsu.

For fucks sake, her only high moment in that war had been that she had impressed a few S rank shinobi. Because she had lots of pointy things. That was it - Kakuzu had said he was impressed with how many weapons she could use, and then she had swung a fan at him and almost killed herself with chakra exhaustion.

Her skill in Fuuinjutsu was mediocre at best, her talent lying in basically sealing, which was the easiest of the branches. Her talent lay in weapons for every occasion - she knew how to use almost every weapon she came across, but only with mediocre skill. And when you're fighting infinitely regenerating zombies of S rank ninja and Former Kage, an army of your own Genjutsu-trapped allies, and people with the literal ability to summon Gods and Demons to their command...

Being able to swing a few swords wasn't all that useful.

So, she knew she was useless. And that was why, as the last dregs of the shinobi resistance prepared to leave Uzushio, she was staying behind.

Naruto had come here looking to find some lost remnant of the Uzumaki clan, bringing the few hundred or so shinobi that were left with him. He knew Madara would follow, bringing enough shinobi to drown them a thousand to one in bodies. This was just a quick stop, a detour on their never-ending nomadic race around the elemental countries.

And she had asked her Hokage to stay behind, while the horde of Madara's armies followed.

She had an argument all planned out - she could seal away her chakra signature for a while, hide under a few dozen feet of dirt and wait until they passed, then come out and look for some more Fuuinjutsu they didn't have the time to stay for. She knew she might be caught and killed, or worse, conscripted into the ranks of Genjutsu-possessed ninja that followed after Madara. But honestly? She was just slowing them down at this point.

The resistance was mostly made up of Elite Jounin, the few Jinchuuriki they had left(Gaara, Naruto, and whoever the Nanabi had been sealed into - some brown haired boy whose name she kept forgetting), the S rank shinobi who remained and a few former Kage. She was barely a B-class Kunoichi in her prime, only managing to hang onto the group with a combination of dumb luck and sheer will.

But when she entered Naruto's tent, and asked him for permission to stay behind, her argument never left her lips. Her Kage, the man she had sworn to follow to the ends of the earth - the man she had fought beside, lost friends beside, had nearly died beside dozens of times - he just sent her a sad, pitiful look and nodded his head, before turning to the next order of business.

He didn't care. To be honest, he was probably just waiting for her to die sooner or later, if he even remembered she was with them still. She left the tent they had hastily set up, sitting down against one of the few trees that grew in the salty air of Uzushio, still stunned.

When dawn broke, Gaara lifted them up on a cloud of sand, borrowing the chakra of two other Jinchuuriki to lift a little over a hundred shinobi and soar over the sea and land, faster than most Ninja could run over water.

Not a one of them looked for her or missed her. None of them even noticed she was gone - probably assuming she had fallen to one of the leftover traps of Uzushio or to the Eternal Tsukiyomi in the night.

And still she watched as the cloud became a speck on the horizon, watched as they dissapeared from view. She barely managed to break out of her stupor to place a chakra-hiding seal on herself(fatal if left on for more than an hour) and hide under some rubble.

None of Madaras massive army noticed her as they passed by and through the broken streets of Uzushio, hundreds of thousands of nearly-silent feet filling the empty island for a few moments before they all left, following the trail of chakra in the air.

And the empty island certainly didn't care as her shock and self-pity turned to frustration, then anger, then a furious, mind-numbing rage. As she pulled herself out of the rubble, ripping the seal from the back of her neck, she distantly noticed she was crying.

She had been abandoned yet again, without a second thought. First by parents she didn't remember, then by teachers who focused on much smarter and better peers, then by those peers who went on to greatness. Then by those peers again, one of them falling in love and the other tearing out her heart before he left.

And now, here she stood, a forgotten, broken, useless girl in an empty city.

Something inside her broke. She stopped lumping herself with Naruto's army as she had before - stopped caring about the fate of the world, stopped caring about humanity as a whole.

She was a third party to this war and enslavement, an outlier that existed because it was simply too unimportant to remove and small enough to overlook.

She turned her eyes to the moon, begging, praying for perfection. She could _feel_ as the foreign chakra of the Tsukiyomi invaded her system, a comforting cold as the genjutsu began to take hold of her mind. The vision filled her mind, and for a moment, she was beginning to feel at peace, until she realized what the vision of her _perfect_ world would be.

Neji.

She tore the chakra away with a twist of willpower, _forcing_ the genjutsu out in a way that shouldn't have been possible. Sheer hatred, hatred of herself, of Neji, of the perfect little children she knew the vision would show her, of the weakness she had almost given into.

She had just tried to give in to an Eternity with the _Betrayer_. And for a moment, she had enjoyed it.

An empty, angry, hollow girl picked her way through the shatter libraries and buildings of Uzushio. Denied the ability to enjoy a perfect lie. Denied the ability to die for a useful cause. Denied a life worth living for, but unable to give in without doing _something_ to give herself satisfaction.

Tenten no longer wished to end the Tsukiyomi, or help Naruto save the world. She no longer cared for justice or retribution or world peace.

Tenten tore herself through a mountain of rubble and bones, digging to find something, _anything_ in her quest. Her fingers cut themselves on stone and steel; her body grew weary as days without rest passed. Her eyes grew sore with tears, and her throat parched in thirst.

But still she searched on, prying apart ruins with her hands and seals, leaving splotches of blood and tears as she waded through the ruins of a forgotten world.

Until finally, after four nights and five days, she found a few scrolls in what was once a section of abandoned Fuuinjutsu projects; discarded because they had no use or were too volatile to function.

She found three, in fact. An early prototype for the Dead Demon Consuming Seal, or the **Shiki Fuuin** , a seal that allowed the user to steal chakra from nearby sources, and a seal to separate the soul of the bearer from their body and rip a hole in the fabric of reality.

And in the ruins of a forgotten city, a ruined girl began to laugh.

 _Present_

Seven months of planning and experimentation, of muttered ramblings and torn paper. Seven months to _force_ three forbidden seals together, to make an ugly, mismatched monstrosity that even she didn't know what it would do.

Then, seven more months of hiding and traveling, doing the best one lonely insane girl could do to follow Madara's army without being seen, muttering softly to herself and clutching a scroll to her chest.

A year and a half of being alone, not talking to another human. Only eating when it became nesscary, only drinking when she could no longer bare the dust in her throat.

She knew she was killing herself slowly, wasting away to skin and bones, her once beautiful hair falling in a ragged, greasy mop.

She didn't care.

And now the day came - the day she had been waiting for. Madara's army had caught up to Nar- to the _Betrayers_ , and she had climbed up a tree and watched.

Watched as they were surrounded, torn to pieces by a legion of dead and ruined, of white not-men and men-who-would-be-gods. She watched with abstract curiosity as people she had onced called ally or even friend - Sakura, Sasuke, Shikamaru, Choji and Kiba(the only ones left of the Konoha 12 that mattered, besides Naruto) went down to thousands of Zetsus and men who _would not die._

And finally, it was just Naruto and Madara left. She couldn't hear what they were saying, not from this far away. But it didn't matter to her - all they would ever speak is lies. That's what _Betrayers_ did after all. They lie, and they hurt, and they kill your dreams and don't even care as they do.

She threw a single, chakra-inhanced kunai into the air, hurling it as far as she could, unfurling her scroll as she did so. Old instincts would tell her when and where it landed - right in front of naruto, as it were.

Good. She wanted to see his face as he became the betrayed.

Using her Kamiwari seal, she appeared right in front of him, a sick grin forming on her gaunt face.

Just in time to take a Chidori to the heart.

She would have laughed if her lungs had let her, but instead all that came out was a rasping gurgle. She fell over on the ground, seeing the surprised face of the _Betrayer_ as her blood splattered his face. Not the face she wanted to see - shock and sorrow, not pain and fury.

But soon. She ignored the pain - or embraced it, she didn't know - and dipped her shaking fingers into the hole in her chest. The scroll was ready - it just needed a couple more kanji to activate. And already they ignored her, thinking her dead, knowing her useless. Madara said some things, and the _Betrayer_ said some things back. Madara laughed, and she found herself laughing with him.

"...Failed, Uzumaki. Nothing you can do will stop me."

She frowned, upset. All this work to end the world and no one even noticed? That wouldn't do. She needed a good one liner, like a manga or movie. Something a cool guy would say. She laughed a little, and they turned to her, surprised.

She spoke out, a rasping, wet set of words falling from bloody lips as she molded chakra to her hand, pressing it on the paper.

"Well, I guess it's good I'm that here to fuck it up for you, isn't it, you assholes?"

The _**Betrayer**_ smiled, as if he was pleased, as if he actually cared about her and knew she could do it all along.

God, he made her sick.

Madara lunged, and she gave the both of them a cheeky two finger salute as the released the chakra she had in her hand into the seal.

For a moment, nothing happened, and Madara's outstretched hand reached out to her face, glowing chakra deadly on his fingertips.

The the seal glowed, and there was a ripping sound as Madara's hand was _pulled into nonexistance_. His arm followed, and then his torso. She heard him scream vaguely until his head, too, was pulling into the rip in reality she had made.

There was a sound of tolling laughter and a feeling of dark, cold pressure on her back as the god of death itself was summoned, using its power to force the rip in reality to stay open. Naruto stumbled back, eyes wide, as Tentens look of glee took on a manic, insane quality.

"What have you done. WHAT HAVE YOU DONE." He cried, raising his arm before it, too, faded into nothing. She could hear the Kyuubi roaring, watched as he attempted to use its Chakra to stall off a force he did not comprehend. Soon the Void was done with the Chakra of demons, and it turned to him next, pulling him faster, ripping him into dust, bit by bit.

"I have betrayed." She muttered, and watched with joy as his face morphed into hurt, into pain, into betrayal.

Then, he was gone, and the rip in reality turned on the rest of the world, and then the Shinigami, who laughed in manic glee as she did, until it pulled him in and he was gone. The tear destabilized, widening, opening further and further, till it spanned the sky and swallowed _everything_ , until the stars themselves were gone _._ And then, when there was nothing left but _nothing_ and her own manic laughter, the void shrank and shrank and shrank, and with insanity in her eyes she grabbed onto the edges of _nothing_ and threw herself into the void.

And she, too, was gone.

 **A/N: Confused? Good. Hopefully this chapter will make sense when you're done reading this.**

 **If the chapter seems disjointed and confusing, keep in mind the Tenten - the 'Narrarator' - is** _ **absolutely insane**_ **by the end of the chapter.**

 **Ten years prior to the present, or the time we are in at the end of the chapter, the fourth shinobi war 'ends.' Neji lives, Tenten loses her leg in the battle against Kakuzu, Tsunade remains Hokage through the fourth war, but is never able to be in combat again after overuse of her Yin Chakra seal.**

 **Naruto and Sasuke's attack successfully kills Madara, and black Zetsu flees, taking Madara's remains with him, unnoticed. Naruto and co. head home, and seven years pass. During this time, Tenten and Neji(who managed to survive due to unimportant reasons) get married, and attempt to have children, but then learn that Tenten has a very low chance of ever getting pregnant.**

 **Tenten decided to have a risky surgery done, but it fails and Tenten is left truly barren and distraught. Neji then divorces her, as he is traumatized by their loss and blames himself. However, in his ever stoic, Hyuuga way, he doesn't tell Tenten about any of this, and she assumes he left because he wanted someone who was useful. She then descends into alcohol and self-pity. Neji, realizing that he was wrong and hurt her by leaving, attempts to reconcile by trying to let her become close to his new family. This is where we find Tenten terrorizing the bar.**

 **During those seven years, Zetsu had been planning nonstop, and kidnaps Karin while she is on a mission. He then tortures her teammates in front of her until she developes the Rinnegan, then places a modified version of Orochimaru's seal on her to force Madara's soul into her body.**

 **Zetsu and Madara then 'Meld' and attack Konoha, killing more than three quarters of the village's shinobi population with a surprise attack facilitated by Obito's Sharingan(which Zetsu also stole.)**

 **The 'Fifth' shinobi war occurs, but the allied elemental nations are already far behind and are blindsided by the surprise attacks.**

 **At the end of the chapter, Tenten(driven insane by years of mental trauma and another three years of war) believes that everyone but herself is out to betray and hurt her, so she decides to kill... everyone but herself. She summons the shinigami, forcing the god to hold her seal stable, as her seal opens a tear in the fabric of space and time, converting everything but herself into pure nature chakra - including the god of death. The seal, once it runs out of chakra to stay active, begins to shrink and Tenten throws herself into it.**

 **This is where we are at right now.**

 **Three answers to three questions -**

 **Why a Tenten Time Travel fic?**

 **A: I wanted to do a time travel fic based around a character that wasn't Naruto. I've also come to the realization that Kishimoto had absolutely no idea why he made so many characters and just left some of them to rot - Tenten(one of my favorites) included.**

 **This also gives me a lot of leeway in ordinance to the past, as Tenten literally did not have a life before the academy, and has no background at all. Literally. She only exists as a bridge between Lee and Neji. That is her only purpose and I hate it.**

 **2) WTF happened there.**

 **A: Tenten threw herself back in time via accident. Her only plan was to destroy the entire universe, and that was less of a plan and more of a side effect of her wanting to piss off Madara and ruin Narutos life. Next chapter will explain exacltly how far back im talking about, and why the Shinigami was involved.**

 **As a side note - this is going to be a fic of conjecture and me making up things I find cool. For one, the Shinigami - a minor at best character - will be in here quite a bit. Tenten will also regain her sanity, she will still be quite messed up.**

 **3) What happened to Legacy of the Namikaze?**

 **A: I write Fanfictions because I have ideas and I want to share them. If I wanted to write stuff for my person gain, I would write - and do write - books of my own. People stopped caring or reviewing Legacy, so I stopped writing it because I assumed no one liked it. I still have ideas for it, but if no one likes the story I'm gonna move on to other things.**

 **I hope you enjoyed the confusing as fuck ride that went on here. Next chapter will be up fairly soon, but will hopefully be less confusing than this one.**

 **If you see any spelling errors, shove them up your ass or become my Beta, one of the two. Its one in the morning and I dont give a shit.**

 **-Alex**


	2. Of Homecomings

_Italics = mental speech_

 **Bold = God/Tailed Beast speech**

 **Jutsu** (translation)

 **Gonna be a bit more confusing and abstract for the majority of this chapter, but we return to earth at the end. Or the elemental nations, as it were.**

 **Spelling or grammar errors are because it is late and I am lazy. If you wish to beta, please ask me. If not, deal. Im tired and cranky.**

Tenten floated.

Or, existed would be a better term. One does not float when there is nothing to float in. Even in the vaccum of space, you would be 'floating.' But there was nothing to float in.

Or to be more accurate, there was _Nothing_ to float in. Tenten existed outside the realm of human comprehension, a single being somehow unravaged by the very space that spawned gods. A mere mortal mind cannot comprehend where she was, because she was nowhere. She was in a place that wasn't a place, in a part of the universe where normal people were not supposed to even think about, much less exist in.

But exist she did. She floated between the fabrics of space and time, unconstrained by pesky rules of physics and things that shouldnt be possible. And so, she floated.

She saw Nothing. It... was impossible to comprehend, You would expect her eyes to be seeing something, at least empty air or space. Maybe a pure, blinding white that would signify her being in a land of empty space like a blank page. Or vast, pure, blinding dark that robbed one of the senses and made one feel blind.

But there was nothing - no, there was Nothing. And she couldn't see it because how does one see nothing? So her mind churned, eyes skirting over the fabrics of the universe, unable to even begin to comprehend a single moment of where or when or how she might be.

And her broken mind shattered further, leaving her a gibbering, insane mess that floated through Nothing - or _Abyss_ , as she began to call it. She also called it mother, and sister, and betrayer and life and death and many other words that could not lable a thing that held no lables. But Abyss is what she thought of it as in her moments of lucidity - moments in which she was not trapped in the broken mirrors that trapped her in her mind.

For Tenten was, without a doubt, insane beyond reasoning. She had torn the world apart, she had become a Betrayer to Betray the _Betrayer._

She hummed a little mad song to herself, her voice carring on waves of air that didn't exist to reach ears that shouldn't exist to register in the mind of a girl who wished she never existed.

"We all lie, we all lie, we all lie." She hummed, eyes darting, wandering over Abyss, unable to find a purchase on the nothingness that was her life now.

She did not hunger, nor thirst, nor tire. She floated between the layers of time and space, and made up names and songs and at one point fancied herself a monk, and wrote out entire phrases to worship the Kami that has forsaken her.

"Oh Kami-nei, lord of betrayal and betrayers, hear the cry of a girl who wishes nothing more than to wrong you."

Her voice was scratchy from constant use, her eyes so used to seeing nothing that when she finally, finally saw something, she registered it as just another bit of madness.

A single, blue light in the distance. She continued her 'prayer,' spouting promises of creation and the innate need of all humanity to lie.

And if she did not notice the blue light grow, take form, answer to her prayer that she forced her mind to go through, she could be forgiven.

She could even be forgiven for not noticing how crowded her mind was becoming - the dark chuckling in the back of her head just another welcome presence in her mind.

And she cried her hymns out, screaming of an imperfect world made by a god who had no love for his creations, only pity apathy, a god who would place naught but a tree for his sons to remember him by.

And she noticed not as the Abyss shrank, becoming a small bubble around her and her alone, and the laughter in her head turned manic, matching her temporary devotion to a false god with its glee.

And, hidden somewhere between the time of fabric and space, Tenten - a poor, unwanted girl with no talents at all - gave birth to Gods.

Tentens return to sanity - or something that closely resembled it - was sudden and abrupt. It was as if something had _forced_ the jagged edges of her mind back together, but not with the subtle delicacy of a smith reforging a broken sword. It was as if someone knew what a sword looked like, then decided the throw the broken pieces together until they vaguely resembled a sword and then welded them together.

Her mind was still.. Warped. She jumped to conclusions, lept over things like logic and reason, mind jumping - or falling - from one topic to the next like a marble falling down stairs - rolling smoothly before a sudden crash.

She was confused, at first. The last thing she remembered was... Nothing.

Her mind cut her off at that point, taking those memories she could not understand and locking them away, repressing them as it had been trying to for years. The Abyss was not for mortal eyes, after all.

And when she looked around - truly, actually, looked - there was nothing near her. Not the emptyness of true nothingness, but nothing as in space and distance. Oh, how she had missed the world having depth.

Far, far off in the distance were the soft pricks of stars in the fabric of space. She could see the nebulae, clouds of stardust and raw atomic material, flew among them, still torn free of reality but somehow trapped within it.

Her world, as it were, had never reached the space age or even thought of the stars beyond copying their movements for star charts and constellations. As such, Tenten did not see clouds of hydrogen or the vast array of galaxies scattered around her.

She saw bright splatters of color, thrown on a black canvas that vaguely resembled a night sky. She saw giant orbs of fire and heat, spaces of nothing that ate away at everything.

For a while, she thought she was insane again.

" **Ah, so we finally return, eh God-Forger?"**

Then she was sure she was insane again.

The voice didn't reach her ears, but more like it was spoken from the deep insides of her mind. She knew how her thoughts 'sounded.' But this was as if someone had bellowed from deep inside her head.

" _Please don't be so loud."_ Was the first thing she thought. Hey, if she was insane and hearing voices, why not be civil?

There was... not a laugh, exactly, but an impression of humor that tinted her mind.

" **As you wish, little smith. It took me quite a while to put your mind back into something worth speaking to. Not that speaking to an insane girl wasn't enjoyable - I just think that after a few thousand years of insanity it was about time we got down to business."** The voice wasn't as loud, per se, but still filled the entirety of her mind. It was a smooth, baritone, masculine voice, and she wondered what the man who owned it looked like.

" **Already putting labels, hm? I was really hoping to be a dragon this time. But at least there's room for interpretation for once... The hair and beads were starting to get annoying. Stupid Hoei and his overdramatic poems."**

"Erm. Excuse me?" She said aloud, but nothing answered. Right. Voices in her head, probably only answered to heard words. Silly Tenten.

" _Excuse me?"_

" **Ah, knew you would get the hint, little smith. I can hear things you say, but thinking is so much... faster. Not nearly as fast as Knowing, of course, but mortals be as mortals are, even if you are the God Forger."** A brief impression of satisfaction, then that same dark humor.

" **I exist as people believe me to be, you see. I don't even know how I look or act until the person I'm talking to believes how I act. Expectations are the rule, and believing is seeing. Hm... Why don't we come to the mindscape of yours and have a chat, face to face?"**

There was a twisting, and a heavy, powerful force _shoved_ on her mind, forcing it to drain into itself like water into a sink.

When she was settled, she saw... well, white. She had a body again, which was nice. Being a floating mind was quite possibly one of the least enjoyable and most insanity-inducing things she had ever had to deal with. She had arms now, and legs. Nice legs. Two, whole, non-metal prosthetic legs. Which was nice.

There was a vague shape of black mist across from her, tendrils of ink on the white page she inhabited. A normal person would have been afraid of the twisting darkness.

Tenten decided to poke it with a stick. A stick that hadn't existed until she poked the darkness with it, but still a stick.

" **Really?"** The voice came from the direction of the ink, and it began to twist in on itself until it vaguely resembled a man. " **I can't tell if this is the leftover fractures of your mind or if you are just naturally this stupid. And to think I used to revere you."** She went to poke it again, but the inky hand slapped it away.

The black settled, became less of a mist and more of a liquid. The shape of the man became more pronounced, the ink running down his body until it began to pool on the floor(a floor she had not been aware of until the ink settled on it). It ran in thick, black ropes of liquid, until it drained almost entirely away, leaving a man behind.

The man was about average height, with pale, almost white skin and vibrant blue eyes. His hair was a shock of silver, spiking out a few inches above his head. The rest of the ink ran down his body, revealing a dark grey formal suit and a black tie. All in all, he looked like a rather handsome albino businessman.

Aside from the fact he was standing in a giant pool of black, sinister liquid, and he was grinning, bearing his razor sharp mouth of fangs.

Tenten cocked her head, sitting down on the cushion beneath her - which had come into existence when she decided she wanted to sit on it. The cute businessman's grin widened, and he opened his mouth to speak.

" **Not many have seen me and lived to tell the tale, Little smith. Be proud you are one of the few to have witnessed the face of the god of Death himself!"**

A wind blew through the empty landscape, ruffling Tentens hair.

She didn't say anything, leaving the Shinigami to shuffle awkwardly. " **Erm. No reaction at all? Really?"** Tenten just frowned slightly, then shook her head negative.

She wanted a smoothie.

Next thing she knew, she was holding a smoothie. _Oh, good. Insanity comes with benefits._ The pale man across from her grumbled, mumbling something about 'shinobi ruin shock value' and 'I used to be scary.'

Tenten took a sip of her smoothie, then hummed appreciatively. It was a good smoothie.

The shinigami sighed, then sat down in a chair that hadn't been there until it had been. " **Just so you know, you aren't insane anymore. This is really happening."** Tenten frowned again, looking down at her(now half-empty) drink. " **Yeah, you can conjure stuff into being. This is your mindscape, little smith. No clue how you didn't figure it out by now - you're a smart girl."**

Tenten spoke for the first time in what was literally an eternity.

"So... The god of death is sealed inside of me now. I was insane, and now I'm mostly not. I ripped the universe in half, and somehow survived. You keep calling me 'God-Forger' and 'little smith' for reasons I don't understand..." She ticked off each point on her finger, then looked up at the man - the God - sitting across from her, a table she had _created from nothing_ seperating them.

" **Other than the fact that you're still trapped in a bubble of** _shshsh_ " - and here his voice cut out, the words tearing themselves from her mind before she had a chance to register them. Human minds can only take so much of a beating. " **\- I'm actually a pretty funny guy, and we currently exist about six billion years before the first human ever walks on your planet, yeah."** Tenten nodded slowly.

Then took another sip of her smoothie. It really was a damn good smoothie. She was a great chef. Or imaginary chef? Imaginator? Hm...

"So... Am I gonna get some answers, or are we gonna stare at each other for a while. Because I'm fine either way. Don't really wanna know the answers."

The Shinigami grinned again, a mouth full of fangs surrounded by a deceptively charming face. " **Hows about we make a deal. Now, I realize that people have told you that dealing with death is a bad idea, but I can guarantee that at the end of this deal, you will come out ahead. You ask me one question, I answer it to the best of my ability, and then once you are satisfied with the answer, I train you on how to really use your chakra for one hour. Deal?"**

The god of death extended a hand, and Tenten stared at it for a moment. It was a normal hand, a rather well kept and groomed hand. Nothing to be scared of. She reached out slowly, then grasped it. "Deal."

For a moment, she was looking at a grinning young man with a dental problem.

The she was _dying, no, dead, floating in a river of souls, unknown, dead, lost, dead, teeth shredding, mouth open wide, soul gone, dead gOne LoSt dEaD gone loSt DEAD emPty torn DEAD -_

And the boy was back again, smiling that sinister grin.

"What... What was that?" She asked, rearing back, letting go of the hand and stumbling back a few feet.

" **That was what it is like to know Death, little smith. Every person who has ever died, who will ever die, and who is currently dying exists at the same time within me. And death? It's never pleasant."**

Tenten nodded, absently, and the grin on his face spread inhumanly wide, showing more teeth than could possibly fit inside his head, and she knew she had made a mistake.

" **As per the agreement, you have acknowledged your satisfaction with your answer. My turn."** The white of her mindscape seemed to twist, fall in on itself, and she could feel herself pull into the center of infinity. " **Oh, and one more piece of information?"** If it was possible, she saw his mouth open wider, even as she watched his image twist and sink into the rip in her mind.

" **You exist outside of reality, little smith. Time has no hold on you now. In other words..."** Her body pulled, shook, _shattered_ as she was pulled, screaming, into the Abyss yet again.

" **... This is going to be a lot longer than an hour."**

 _5.6 Billion BC in earth years._

Her second return to sanity was much slower going, seeing as it was unassisted. It took her barely a day's worth of human time - if time could even be measured - for her to break again.

It took about... 5 million years, give or take, for her mind to resemble enough of a person for her to be pulled back into her mindscape, sitting across from the god of death yet again.

Who was drinking a smoothie. Her smoothie.

" **Took you long enough. Thought of another question yet?"**

Tenten stared at him, impassive. The silence stretched on, until the Shinigami tired of waiting for her to speak and finished the glass he had before him. It was more for comedic and psychological effect anyways. Something about making her realize just how irrelevant time was, and how truly powerless she was before the might of a god, or something?

And it was a good smoothie.

Finally, she spoke.

"Why do you call me God-forger, or little smith." It was less of a question than a statement, but he grinned anyways. Tenten spoke in monotone, her eyes unwavering. How boring, he thought. She was rather amusing the last time. Maybe this time would she would come back funny?

" **The existance of dieties is a fickle thing. A god is born when a person truly believes that they exist, and they get their power from being worshiped. Very Stargate-y if you ask me, but I'm quite a bit stronger than any Ori ever was."** When Tenten didnt move a muscle, he sighed. " **Uhg. I hate talking to walls. Anyways, if you can pull it out of that broken hellhole you call a mind, you accidently gave birth to Kami a while back. Something about the father of all Betrayers? Ring any bells? You made Kami, Kami made universe, universe made people, people made more gods. Thus, I call you the little smith, and every god who is ever created calls you the God-Forger."**

He chuckled, a sinister, deep, dark sound. " **Such a pity, too. If you were anything but mortal - hell, even dead - you would grow from the power of the worship of millions of gods. But, alas, I control your death, and you will remain mortal for a while yet."**

Tenten didn't react in the slightest, and the Shinigami took her silence as permission to cast her back into the Abyss.

Then he made another smoothie.

" **Mm. Soul flavored."**

 _4.8 Billion BC_

Seventeen trips down insanity lane later, Tenten was back. The last seventeen questions she had asked were as idiotic as they were inconsequential - things like "Why is blue" or "why are you doing this to me." The first question was answered with a discussion that drove her insane even before she went back to the Abyss, the second was answered ' **Because I can and I'm an asshole'** before the Shinigami tossed her crying soul into nothingness.

The fact that he would let her ask such questions - proof that she was only just barely on the brink of sanity - shone on how much of an asshole he was. Oh, the fun he had breaking her.

"How is this helping me at all?" She asked, kicking back in her recliner chair. She was comfortable enough(both with her mind and in his presence) to close her eyes for a moment, savoring the feeling of, well, existing.

Neither of them commented on the fact that the sky was overcast, and it was raining shards of glass.

" **Finally, a useful question. Hm. Let me ask you this, little smith - how do you make high-quality steel?"**

She sat up slowly, thinking. Being raised in a weapons shop had its upsides, but the whole 'almost one billion years of insanity' thing made it hard to remember.

"Well, first you heat the iron, then mix in the perfect amount of carbon. You then continually agitate the carbon and iron until they mix into steel, then... remove the... impurities..." She trailed off, looking at him in pure, undisguised interest.

"My mind is the iron, and the Abyss is carbon. You're trying to find the perfect balance, and forcing me to discard anything that is harmful to the mix in the process."

The pale god grinned, meeting her eyes. " **I'm going to turn you into the most perfect weapon this universe has ever seen."**

She raised an eye - not an eyebrow, an actual eye. As in, it slid up her face, completely ignoring the fact it was supposed to be lodged in an eye socket and tethered to her brain.

"If this is just the smelting process, then how are you planning on forging me?"

" **That's another question, little smith. If you can remember, ask again next time."**

She sat back in her chair, feeling the now-familiar feeling of the Abyss coming to claim her.

"Bastard." She huffed out, then was taken away again.

"So. How goes the forging now?"

Tenten was sitting in an awkward position, the cushion replaced with a rocking chair. The fact that Tenten was sitting with her legs pulled up into her body and her toes curled around the edge of the chair, her eyes flickering around warily as if expecting an attack to come from any angle.

" **Hm. Ryuk was right - this is super weird to watch."** He mumbled, remembering another paranoid human who had sat as she did.

" **Anyways. As of right now, we are sorting personalities and compartmentalizing. The** _shshsh_ " and here Tenten flinched, the words once again incomprehensible but somehow wrong, twisted. " **Is acting as a filter of sorts - we're currently taking apart sections of your mind, forcing them to manifest as separate personalities, then driving those personalities absolutely insane and manifesting a new one."**

" **This serves two purposes - the first is that eventually, you will be left with a blank slate of sorts - a primary personality based entirely around logic that can withstand the pressure of** _shshsh_ **without breaking. This will serve as our base template, and we will then spend quite a while modifying and further enhancing your 'prime' mentality until I deem it time for us to put the rest of your mind back together, combining all of the broken personalities until you, as a whole individual, can withstand absolute nothingness without flinching."** His grin widened, and as such Paranoia - and it was the paranoid aspect of her mind - drew into herself, tugging on the fabric of her pants. He noted, with interest, at how a kunai formed in her hand instinctively. Not because she planned to attack, or thought he would, but simply because she felt safer with a weapon in hand.

Good. It was so much more fun with a fighter.

The next time Tenten materialized, she began swinging a massive sword at him the second she was able. Good. It appeared bloodlust or rage had manifested.

" **You would fight a god, little smith?"** He asked, grinning, as Tenten growled, the massive cleaver-like weapon(what represented Kubikiribocho, Momochi Zabuza's old sword) whistling as it hurtled at his head at massive speeds. He blocked it with a single finger, smiling the whole time.

"Die, damn you. DIE!" She screamed. _**Rage, then.**_ He thought absently. Tenten swung her sword around her, spinning with the momentum and weight of the sword before smashing it downwards as hard as she could.

He blocked it with a strand of hair, then absently took a sip of his tea.

It wasn't actually tea, but it was the theory of the thing. Human instincts have been programmed, as were those all base animals, to only eat when they are absolutely sure that it is safe to do so. As such, his decision to eat - or drink as it were - made Tenten believe he was absolutely in no danger whatsoever. Psychology 101 - manipulation of base instincts.

 _ **Maybe that's why chewing gum while fighting seems so badass. Hmm...**_

Tenten growled again, swinging the massive sword in a reckless, two-handed grip. Overhand, backhand, thrust, slash, overhand, overhand, twisting slash, thrust, jumping swing... Her attacks grew faster and more powerful as her anger grew at every blocked attack. Soon, the god was simply letting her wail on him, not even bothering with the illusion of effort, watching with concealed glee as her sword dented and bend with each attack on his body.

Finally, she swing the sword downwards as hard as she could, and it simply shattered over his head.

He took another sip of tea.

"WHY WILL YOU NOT DIE." She shouted, her face red from effort and her hands bleeding from her reckless attacks. He looked at her, droll.

" **Do the words 'god of death' not really mean that much to you?"** He asked deadpan, then sighed as she screamed, charging at him. A wave of her hand and her charge turned into a fall as he opened a rip in reality, her own momentum tossing her into the Abyss.

" **Humans. Incredibly asinine, the whole lot of them."**

 _3.9 Billion BC - 1.7 Billion years into Tenten's 'training.' The first cell on Earth is born._

" **Finally."** He muttered, eyeing the girl before him, who was sitting quietly on a chair she had conjured. Rather than the blank, white space that they had had for every single meeting before then, they were seated in what appeared to be the classroom from her academy days.

Finally, after dozens, if not hundreds of iterations, he had been left with a pure, emotionless and rational human being. A few hundred questions and millions upon millions of years had been the cost, but for a God, Knowledge and Time were nearly limitless.

The past few personalities were increasingly irrational and nonsensical, as the human mind attempted to use something, anything as a frame to keep itself together, if not entirely intact. Humor had been, well, funny at first but then incredibly annoying. Lust... well, that wasn't worth talking about. He never thought a God was capable of embaressment, but damn if she hadn't come close to causing it.

And here they were. He had made something rather incredible, if he said so himself - a true sociopath. Not constrained by emotions, or human societal norms, or desires or anything of the sort.

The perfect blank canvas. An intelligent, mortal being who could look into Nothing and not be bothered by it - so far as he knew, something that had never, ever happened before.

" **And how are you today, Tenten?"** He asked, testing for a reaction.

She frowned, as if her mood had never been a concern of hers before he mentioned it. "I am... well, I believe."

" **You believe?"**

"Well, you went to all the trouble of sealing away all of my emotions. I would assume you have a reasoning for this - as you have had for all your actions in the past. As of right now, I have no frame of reference to decide how my emotional wellbeing is. I am not hungry, nor am I tired, nor in pain, so... I am well." She recounted in a low, inflectionless voice her reasonings, and the shinigami nodded.

" **Yes, I have my reasons. Would you like to hear them, or shall we head straight to the next phase?"**

She cocked her head, considering, then nodded. "Your reasonings would be... interesting to hear. I think I would... enjoy them." She paused, thinking. "Would me asking a question now cause you to send me back to the Abyss?"

" **The Abyss? An apt name, I suppose. And no, it would not. Ask when you have a question."** He settled in his seat, looking around at the walls of the building around them, watching as they began to shift and warp their positions. When it settled, he was amused at how he found himself seated behind a large desk and her sitting at her own students table.

" **There will be a test later, so be sure to take notes class."** He joked, and then sighed as Tenten nodded and proceeded to take out a pen and paper.

" **It was a joke."** He said, sighing again. " **I know you don't understand those right now. We need to get Humor out as one of the first aspects of your personality."**

Tenten merely nodded again, then placed the pen and paper under her desk where they proceeded to stop existing. The shinigami clapped his hands once, then began to speak.

" **As you may have guess by now, we are starting a rebuilding process. I have separated each and every part of your mentality, and what has been left behind is the part I am speaking to now - Id and parts of Ego, if you will. The primitive, instinctive part of the human mind, and the part of the mind that makes all the choices. I have chosen to call this mentality Prime, if you will."**

" **I assume you don't know of Sigmund Freud, so I will explain. The human mind is made up of three separate psyches - Id, Ego, and Superego. To simplify - the Id is the primitive section of the mind that tells us what we want. The Ego tells us how we do it, and the Superego keeps the things we do from being abnormal or considered taboo in human society. Following so far?"**

Following her nod, he continued.

" **We have successfully removed the entirety of the Superego and portions of the Ego from your mind. Id remains as it cannot be removed without destroying you entirely, and some parts of Ego refuse to be removed, even after being introduced to severe mental trauma."**

" **For example, if I were to tell you that you no longer needed to eat or breathe, the Id would keep you doing so either way. However, after millennia spent in the ... Abyss, did you call it? ... you have learned that breathing is no longer necessary and the section of the Ego that makes your lungs function has decayed and with it, the section of Id that calls out for air as well. There is also the fact that several attempts to stop yourself from breathing have eradicated those sections as well."**

" **The same goes for hunger, sleep, water... so on and so forth. Most sections of your mind have rotted due to disuse and mental trauma, so I just need to remove a few of the things left before we can begin to put you back together."**

" **As you are now... well, for starters you'd suffocate the second you entered the human world. Because you don't breath anymore."**

Tenten nodded slowly. "I can see how that would be an issue."

The God snorted, running a clawed hand through his white hair. Almost sounded like humor there for a second. " **This next stage is going to increase your control over your mind, your body and, most importantly - your chakra."**

She leaned forward expectantly. If not for the fact that she was currently completely incapable of emotions, you'd think that she was excited to learn. In truth, it was simply now part of her subconscious to obey the God of Death - being forced through insanity hundreds of times would do that to you. Something the Shinigami conveniently didn't mention, nor intend to change. Danzo may have been a shortsighted, over-confidant fool, but he could agree with him -

Having a loyal minion or two was always nice.

He spread his hands on his desk, standing up. " **In case you have forgotten, this is your mindscape. You have absolute control over what happens, what exists and what doesn't. In this place, you are a literal god."** He waved a hand, gesturing to the walls of the academy she had instinctively structured around them.

" **Repeat after me - This is Mine."**

"This is mine."

He shook his head, smirking. " **Wrong. Try again."**

Tenten sat back, the barest flickers of confusion flashing over her face. She had said exactly what he did - what was the issue?

"This is mine!" Maybe inflection was off? The way he said mine was different. That must have been it.

" **Is it yours? It it really?"** He said, his grin widening, rows of fangs revealing themselves. " **This is your mind. You body. Your soul! This is yours."**

"This is _mine._ " No, the meaning behind the word was off. She wasn't supposed to be repeating the words after him, she was supposed to mean the words.

"This is Mine." Her mind. Her place. Hers! No one elses. In here, she was powerful - he said so himself. A primordial being, an essence of reality, the fabric of space and time itself - they were hers! In this mind, she was Perfection incarnate.

As she thought this, she could _feel(no, not feel_ _ **no**_ _feel_ _ **is**_ _a_ _ **wrong**_ _wordt_ _ **his**_ _is_ _ **hers**_ _)_ the fabric of the mindscape...filled, for lack of a better world. It was as if a warm summer breeze had replaced a chill in the air she had not noticed was there. Cracks in the sky - proof that this was her mind, and that her mind was broken - began to slowly mend, heal, fuse together. The empty white background of the world began to fill with the weapons shop where she was raised, the place she felt most comfortable. She sighed, feeling whole in a way she had never felt before.

His grin grew wider, until it literally reached both ears, proof that looking human was the least of his concerns. " **Good... But no, this is Mine."**

There was a tearing sensation, as control of the world around her was torn from her. She felt an immense sensation of loss, and for the first time since she had been here, she felt emotion - Anger. How dare he claim her mind as his?

"No. This Is MINE." A rush of air, a swell of heat, the feeling of being _whole_ once more as control was hers again. She knew - _knew_ \- that she could do anything here, Anything she wanted.

The Shinigami opened his mouth to speak again, and in a surge of anger and defiance she took his mouth away. He couldn't speak if he had no mouth to form words, could he?

For a moment, she could see his eyes widen in surprise, then glimmer with humor.

There was a moment of quiet, then control was once again ripped from her with startling ease and no small amount of pain.

" **Good. Keep that feeling in mind as we begin."**

He sat up, and the world around them shifted, though not under her command. Soon they were standing on a ragged cliffside, harsh winds whipping at her hair and clothing, while he stood unruffled on the edge of the cliff.

" **For our next phase, you will wrest control of your mindscape from me and toss me over this cliff. There will be punishment for each time you fail, and each time you succeed I will bind an aspect of your personality back into your mind, and we will begin again."**

She frowned. "And.. what would the punishment be?"

His grin reappeared, though smaller this time. " **Lets say... one hundred deaths."**

Her frown deepened, confusion obvious on her face. Death didn't scare her anymore - far from it. However, she doubted the god of Death would let her have that release.

She glared at him. This was her mindscape. Her home, hers. She would not let an outsider take it from her.

She could feel that wonderful feeling of warmth and being _whole_ as the power surged back into her, and just as she was about to summon a wave of force to throw him over the cliff it was cut off, torn away from her.

" **You fail."**

And before she could protest she was

 _-Lungs full of liquid, choking, cold, air gone, sinking no no nonono-_

 _-Sudden impact pain pAin PAIN breath not coming, slow painful rasps-_

 _-"No please, please, no" As the metal tube was raised to her face, finger squeezing around the handle, sudden loud noise and pain an-_

 _-Sword decending in a glittering arc, blood and falling and she could_ _see her body_ _and-_

 _-NonoNonOno not ready please no who would watch the children and -_

 _-Can't breath choking air no air AIR AIR NO -_

Falling.

One hundred deaths later, she stood up uneasily, shaking legs causing her to stumble and fall a few times.

"What... how..."

The grin seemed less sadistic and even a little sorrowful, an emotion she did not think the God was capable of. " **That is death, little smith. Every time a person dies, I live their final moments. I just decided to share a small, small piece of it with you."**

She stood on legs that could barely hold her, before she summoned a chair to sit in. "Every... every time a person dies? You feel... That. Constantly." She shuddered.

Bitterly, the god replied. " **Every single time. People don't really bother to think about what being the 'shepherd of souls' means. Every dying moment, every last breath, every final thought..."** She could _feel_ the pain in his voice.

" **That was only a hundred. Over the course of my existence, I have partaken in trillions. Every death of every sentient being that believes in a deity of any sort must pass through my mind to be witness, thought upon, and then judged, so I may send them to whatever level of the afterlife they belong."**

She stood up on shaking legs, then bowed deeply to the God of Death.

"My apologies, Shinigami-Sensei. For misjudging you."

The god snorted. " **Humans. Sentimental, stupid, compassionate creatures."** He sighed again, then his eyes widened in shock as he was forced towards the cliff by a blast of mental power from Tenten. He looked at her, surprised, and met her grin with his own.

"I guess it's a good thing I'm barely human, hm?" The Shinigami's unnatural grin spread across his face again, bisecting the mask he wore with a cavern of teeth.

" **But, they can also be... Ruthless. I like that."** But then he snapped his fingers anyway, and Tenten died another hundred times.

 _200,000 B.C. - The first ancestor of modern-day humans walks the earth_

Tenten stood in her world. For it was, truly, her world. Her mind, inside her body, both of which belonged to herself and herself alone.

It had taken a long, long time to rebuild herself completely. A long time to come to discard the rules she was born believing, and force herself beyond limits that were meant to be absolute. But now...

Now. she was human again. But she was so much more.

She had reached a plane of enlightenment that monks could never even dream of, much less reach. Becoming one with the world was nice and all, but knowing oneself - each and every piece - was a world of eternities.

She was Tenten. A heart, bones, soul, lungs, spirit, stomach, spine, chakra coils, eyes, brain - she knew each and every single piece of her body and how they worked - how _she_ worked.

She knew each and every electrical impulse that passed through the nueral networks of her brain, billions upon billions of tiny currents every nanosecond, sending impulses and thoughts and cataloging sensations and memories and recalling them within instants -

She knew every cell, how it functioned, meshed, grew and worked and split and grew and ate and moved and spread -

She was Tenten, daughter of none, sword of the Shinigami, smelted in the fires of the Void, tempered in the cold embrace of death, and forged by his hand and her will.

And right now, she was drinking a smoothie.

Or, more accurately, a mental projection of a smoothie, created by her mind and ying chakra, creating artificial impulses in order to replicate and induce sensations of touch, smell, taste, sight and hearing.

But she called it a smoothie. Because she was god of the mindscape, and her word was law, so therefore it was a smoothie. Nya.

Sitting across the ceremonial tea table from her, crouched on a cushion, was the god of death himself. Fangs, claws, glowing white eyes and all.

And they were arguing as they ate, a conversation with many hand motions that threatened to spill the food and raised voices that moved mountains in the background.

What were they arguing about?

Well...

"Of course it's obvious that the Force is a sentient being. There is absolutely no way that a joint consciousness could possibly direct and interact as delicately as it did in the destruction of that space station."

" **But it is a clearly agreed upon fact that the Jedi and the Sith see the Force as a collection of wills of every living creature."**

"Well, obviously it is - but those wills had to have combined into a single presence, if not a being. There is no way that a simple omnipresent will could do things like direct weapon fire or look into the future. The Force, as they name it, is obviously the source of the beings power and knowledge, but there has to be something to direct and choose how the power is spent and what knowledge is spared. Otherwise Luke would have, instead of firing the perfect shot into the core of the death star, had the sudden urge to preen his hair for Tamerian Louse Grubs or something."

" **But the people believe it is a collection of wills, and that it is not a sentient being. It is said so quite obviously in the Jedi codex."**

Tenten huffed. "Blah, blah, power of belief, yeah yeah I get it. But what's to say that a few people or maybe even the precursors to the Jedi/Sith didn't believe it was a single being? Hell, that much power and will combined into a single place has to coalesce into something, even if it is a material like Chakra crystals rather than a single being."

" **Your theory has merit. But, I have visited the realm, and no sentient being has come to interact with me, no matter how many souls I stole from its domain."**

"Well, that's obviously because the being feeds off the combined wills of any living creature, not their death. It clearly has no dominion over their souls once they die."

" **How do you explain ghost Yoda/Obi-Wan/Vader then?"**

"Urk."

A long time ago, yes. Galaxy far far away? Not so much. Once you get over the hurdles of interstellar travel and all. Relativity was like gravity - easily ignored with enough power.

Tenten wished that traveling as fast as they did cut a few million years out of her life.

After a few hours of pointless debate - in which they both agreed to disagree - the Shinigami settled down on his cushion. " **So, Tenten. We are rapidly approaching the moment of your birth, and I will not be able to keep your soul from re-attaching itself to your human body. As such, I think that it is high time we got to the final stage of your training."**

Tenten sat up, both eager and wary - with reason. Being forced to go insane and die a few hundred thousand times will make you wary about any sort of 'training.' "And what would that be?"

" **Well. First, allow me to explain the things you will no longer be able to do once you are back in a human body."**

" **First, you will never be able to use a Ninjutsu ever again, or it will kill you instantly via draining out every last bit of your chakra at once."**

Tenten blinked, looking across the table at him. "I do wish you would have told me this sort of thing beforehand."

" **You made a deal, you get to deal with it."** He grinned. " **Besides, the upsides are fantastic. You will also be unable to use fuuinjutsu ever again. Both of these are because your chakra has become infused with your very soul and body. Before, there were three seperate parts - your soul, your body, and your chakra, which was created by the meeting of those two and held them together."** He clapped his hands together as he spoke, overlapping his hands to show unity. " **Now, however, your soul and chakra are one and the same. They are linked directly to your body, thus anchoring your soul permanently to your body."** Here, his hands dissolved into an inky black mist, before reforming to show that he had literally fused his hands together at the wrist.

" **Attempting to use your chakra as an energy source will also use pieces of your soul and your body as you do so, causing an unstable reaction that overloads the jutsu and rips a hole in the fabric of reality around you, turning you into pure energy, stripping you of sentience, then throwing you into the Void."**

Tenten nodded, then took another sip of her smoothie. It was still an excellent smoothie.

"Hmm..." Tenten rested her head on her hand, thinking. "Could be a bummer. I assume there are upsides?"

His grin grew wider than its usual - impossible and terrifying - width, until it stretched around his entire face, bisecting his head. " **Well, there's a few of those. For one, you can form your chakra into a physical construct at will. Pretty useful, but takes up a lot of chakra... not that that's really an issue for you anymore..."** Seeing her raised eyebrow, he chuckled, deep and raspy. " **Did I forget to mention? When you single-handedly destroyed the universe, you also converted all of the matter into chakra. Which is now permanently part of your chakra, seeing as you can't spend chakra normally anymore."**

"That... Actually sounds incredibly awesome." She said, flexing her hands. "Kind like those guys in that order of the green lightbulbs or whatever, right?"

" **Indeed. The difference being where they were restricted by a limiter placed on their rings, the only limit you have is your incredibly massive chakra reserves. Seeing as your chakra constructs will all have the same strength and durability regardless of size... You can probably make a solid cubic kilometer of physical chakra at any given time."**

"Im making a chakra mech suit."

If it were possible, he would have sweatdropped. " **Thats... not feasible. You can't make complex moving mechanisms, and it would be so much easier to -"**

"Nope. Making a mech suit." She nodded as it were a indomitable fact, then took another sip of her smoothie. "Im punching Madara in the face with a gundam and you can't stop me." She half-heartedly punched her fist up into the air. "For my drill is the drill that pierces the heavens."

" **You know, Im really beginning to regret showing you the rest of the universe."**

" **Anyways... how good are you at genjutsu?"**

She paused, considering. "Before? Not all that good. But genjutsu are basically imposing your chakra and willpower over someone else, so... I think I could probably be the best genjutsu mistress this world has ever seen. But... don't genjutsu cost chakra to create?"

" **A couple of misconceptions."** He flicked up three fingers, one after the other, as he made his points. " **First, genjutsu use your chakra to create and trick the sensations of the body, forcing themselves into the enemy's chakra coils to do so. It's not so much willpower as it is chakra control. Second, they do not cost chakra, it is just that you are the only person to ever be able to re-capture your chakra after it leaves your body. And third..."**

His grin grew to epic proportions, spreading until it reached the back of his head.

" **You will not be the best genjutsu mistress. You will be a goddess of illusions. Anything that comes into contact with your chakra will have said chakra forced into their system, allowing you to mold it to your will. Your illusions will feed themselves off the very minds of your enemies, and never end, because the chakra never fades. They will also be nearly unbreakable unless someone forces an absolutely incredible amount of chakra through their systems... In which case you can manipulate the chakra to go right back into their coils."**

She nodded, now very impressed. "Not bad. Not bad at all."

" **There is also the added side effect of your yin chakra levels raising to obscene amounts due to all the time you have spent in your mindscape. This means your genjutsu can be insanely intricate, and even more impossible to break. And also that you can open the eight gates with relative ease, because you will be able to balance the massive amounts of yang chakra the gates provide.**

Tenten was visibly shocked. "Why has no one ever realized that the damage from opening the gates is an imbalance of yin and yang chakra?" That... is such an easy solution. Tsunade could have easily made herself immortal if she used her seal of a hundred with the gates open - repairing all the damage done to her body with her own natural yang chakra and increasing her strength tenfold to boot.

" **Because humans are stupid, obstinate creatures who refuse to think outside of what they already know?"**

She nodded. Damn if that wasn't true. Stupid people couldn't even figure out that you could do the exact same thing as the yellow flash (dur de dur greatest Hokage ever) if you knew how to _**Kamiwari**_ fast enough. Like, literally the first jutsu they teach genin, ever.

Tenten wasn't really human anymore, so she was not insulted by the shinigami insulting an entire species.

" **That's about it. And now, the first of your insufferable stupid species is about to wonder where we go after we die and do some stupid rain dance and summon me. And I will be tied to the living world once more, unable to return."**

Tenten set her(neverending, always cold and non-brainfreeze inducing) smoothie on the table before them. "You complete and utter asshole. You did the fun part(and here she used liberal air quotes with her fingers) of torturing/forcing a power and curse upon me, and now you refuse to help me learn how to use it."

Once again, that reality-defying and incredibly aggravating grin full of teeth she wanted to punch out spread across his face. " **Well, you have about 200,00 years now - literally, seeing as my presence here will not be manipulating the field of space-time and the** _shshsh_ **will lose interest in trying to remove you from existence. Have fun, and enjoy the growing pains!"** And with that - and also the loud sounds of tribal chanting and the sound of bone-one-bone - Tenten gave death the finger as he left, cackling.

Death was cackling, that is. Tenten was cursing him.

"God, what an asshole."

"So. Turns out that human beings don't actually have souls until they are born. Neat." Tenten frowned, cocking her head. "I get the feeling that I just pissed off some minor religion that doesn't really matter in some afterlife somewhere."

The reason for this conclusion was that Tenten was currently watching her mother(and that was wierd and kinda tugged on heartstrings she thought she had gotten rid of - her mother was about to give birth to her and _die._ ) grow pale even as she pushed, a sad-faced older woman muttering soft encouragement in the back of the whorehouse she was born in.

"Never knew I was an Aksenenko. Wierd."

Tenten's presence in the living world was caused by her soul being tugged towards her body as it got closer and closer to the living world - something that was very welcome, after two thousand millennia of being alone.

Tenten had spent those years in good use, however. A few thousand years spent figuring out the limits of her power, a few more thousand experimenting, then spending a rigorous ten thousand years to develop and create as many ideas as she could think of. Eventually, she had created ten sects - or 'Arts' as she called them. She also named them all - not that she needed to shout the names of the techniques out like some plebeian who needed to remind themselves of how to mold chakra for each jutsu. No, shouting out awesome names for awesome techniques was just cool.

A reason why she thought that basically everyone in the ninja world did it. Either that, or thousands of years of ingrained habit and none of the brainless humans had ever figured out that the first person to use ninjutsu had shouted out names to help teach people to classify ninjutsu.

Somewhere in the realm of limbo before reincarnation, the sage of six paths sneezed.

The fact that her mother was about to die of a bad childbirth in the back of a rundown, dingy whorehouse in the red light district caused Tenten no distress. This was just another human she got to watch die in her eyes. No sense in becoming emotionally attached. However, the fact that she was dying when she could easily be saved by even a single med-nin in training - hell, even a genin that knew the **Shosen** (Mystical Palm) technique could have saved her - that made her mildly upset.

"Push, dear. I can see the head."

There was a strange, twisting pull on her body, and Tenten felt the nausea of unwanted teleportation in her throat. There was a rushing of air, a sickening squelch, and loud pop -

And Tenten, daughter of a nameless whore, was back in the living world, and she laughed until she cried, weak baby arms flailing.

The older woman/midwife smiled as she held Tenten in her arms, lifting her(and _damn_ if that wasn't the most disorienting and aggravating feeling of helplessness she had ever felt) up to chest height. "She's beautiful, dear. Perfect in every way."

The breathing of her mother slowed, and the old woman shed a few tears as the baby stopped crying, as if the poor girl could sense her mother dying. The old whore set the baby down in the crook of pale womans arm, watching with a teary smile as it squirmed in as her mother held the baby to her chest for the first and last time. "My beautiful baby. Little Tenten."

She decided to leave, give the poor girl a few moments of privacy before she passed on.

Not thirty seconds later, the breathing of the new mother slowed and stopped.

Thirty one seconds later, Tenten decided to use a chakra construct to move her off of the body. If her tongue was working, she would have said **Undo no Geijutsu:Kumo** (Art of Movement - Cloud) and risen on a thin platform of opaque, black chakra like some sort of flying plate with a baby on it.

As it was, she instead began to scream in pain as the act of using her chakra for the first time reminded her of what the shinigami's last words to her before he left were.

 _ **Have fun, and enjoy the growing pains.**_

As Tenten found out - rather rudely - an unfortunate side effect of having your soul be a considerable bit older than your body meant that your soul wanted your body to change to match it. Now, a normal time traveller in a younger selves body would just feel a vague bit of discomfort and move on.

In Tentens case, however, her chakra and soul were the same thing.

Which meant not only did her soul want her body to change - it had the power to do so.

About five minute of the agonizing experience of having your body forcibly stretched and having all the cells in your body grow and divide millions of times a second, Tenten was now an adult again.

Fancy that.

She looked up to the door at a mutter curse to see the old whore and a few of the other women standing there, watching with wide eyes. She looked down at herself. Her nude, blood-covered adult self where there should be a baby. Her nude, adult self that still had an umbilical cord attached to her now dead mother.

She nodded slowly, before reaching down and ripping off the cord from her body. The women took this as their cue to run away screaming about soul stealing demons or something.

"Hm. This is going to cause a few horror stories." She grinned to herself, then looked down at her body. A muttered **Sozo No Geijutsu:Nuno** (Art of creation - cloth) and she was free of blood and clad in a black, form-fitting ANBU uniform, sans mask.

"The only downside to physical chakra constructs made by pure will - it only comes in black."

Tenten turned from the cooling corpse of her now and forever nameless mother, and jumped to the window. She allowed herself a single look back, a glimpse at the woman that could have been her closest loved one.

But wishes were meaningless and hope was fleeting, and Tenten had far too much work to do.

And with the sound of moving air and a spring of cloth-clad feet, Tenten was gone.

 **A/N lots of confusing stuff here. Good.**

 **Tenten doesn't have much of a past in the manga, so I'm going with the tried and true 'adopted by a weapons shop owner' theme. And by doesnt have much of one, I mean she gets shown as a kid like once and never spoken about again.**

 **Needless to say, her past wont be havimg much of an effect here.**

 **And just so we get this clear, Tenten is two things - OOC and kinda OP. Unbreakable genjutsu that can be applied with a single touch of her chakra and she can make things with her mind out of pure, solid chakra.**

 **Basically, she has a better version of Gaara's sand ability, but with chakra. Kinda OP.**

 **Theres also a few glaring weaknesses - like she cannot use jutsu of any sort or she instantly** _ **fades into nothingness.**_ **Anything that is not genjutsu is a big no-no. Opening the gates is easier for her now, but even that will damage her body as it does to all who use it.**

 **Also - wierd Kabuto teammate fromt he chuunin exams, Azura path, and the Ambure clans will suck the chakra from her body forever. Maybe not kill her liek jutsu do, but once chakra is gone - its gone. She has a lot of it, yeah, but she has to use a ton of it at a time. Basically, making a chakra construct uses about as much chakra that an S-rank jutsu would for a normal jounin. She has enough for about a hundred in her 'tank.'**

 **And shes's OOC because she's fucking insane and has no empathy for human life or suffering anymore.**

 **Basically, I killed Kishimoto's character Tenten and made her a twisted little mouthpiece for my crazy ideas.**

 **Till next time,**

 **-Xander**


End file.
